learning to see and savor the glory of Christ.

For those of you that are familiar with John Piper, the following quote will be quite familiar! Familiar or not though, my forgetful heart forgets again and again the glory and awesomeness of God, and I forget that He is my treasure. I forget that my soul thirsts for the glory of God and not earthly comfort in its many different forms. I start seeing sin as attractive, and forget that it’s blinding me from His glory, distorting the truth of God and claiming it to be a lie. So I’m grateful and glad to hear from a teacher that truly understands the greatness of God, and rejoices in it greatly.

Piper quotes Jonathan Edwards, who says that “God is glorified not only by His glory’s being seen, but by it’s being rejoiced in. When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it. His glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and the heart”.

He writes:

There are always two parts to true worship. There is seeing God and there is savoring God. You can’t separate these. You must see him to savor him. And if you don’t savor him when you see him, you insult him. In true worship, there is always understanding with the mind and there is always feeling in the heart. Understanding must always be the foundation of feeling, or all we have is baseless emotionalism. But understanding of God that doesn’t give rise to feeling for God becomes mere intellectualism and deadness. This is why the Bible continually calls us to think and consider and meditate, on the one hand, and to rejoice and fear and mourn and delight and hope and be glad, on the other hand. Both are essential for worship.

Today, we lack depth, and we lack a heart for Christ. But when we address one, we often neglect the other. I’m glad that Piper points out how both are in relation to the other. In the general Asian American Christian culture, it always frustrates me that we say that we have a hard time loving God and being passionate and yet we neglect to take up the word of God, and really try to understand it and chew on it. I do this myself. I can make every effort to stir up my emotions, but our love for God will be as deep as our understanding of Him, and our desire to know and treasure Him. May we worship God by seeing and savoring Him!